I know about wireshark and am in fact very good at it. Any way to start a program and sniff the live code of a machine... or preferably a VirtualBox Machine?
Don't sniff PCs, it will fry your brain, the high isn't worth it man!
Haha. But seriously.. Does anybody know?
I'm not sure that's possible without making at least some changes to the OS you're "sniffing". Maybe you could just get a super basic text based log system going? I think Debian will do it but don't take my word for it lol
I just fixed one the lady's cat pissed on ... if anyone wants to know. lol
Edit .. oh maybe it's not that kind of thread meh
You can hard-wire an assembly code "reader" (in layman's terms) to a computer processor and read of all the data in the registers and pointer. Intel x86-32 has 8 registers and one pointer only.
By "Live Code" I presume you mean actually reading out what the system is doing. At a hardware level (like lonewolf says) is do-able, however near impossible to make sense of in real time due to the speed at which modern computers operate.
If you want to monitor systems as in applications running, monitoring system resources (at the OS level). You need to look into backdoors or bruiting passwords. Both of which should only be done for pen testing purposes. (*wink wink*)
You can also network sniff a machine with nMap to see what's currently active in terms of hitting the network and out of which ports.
Its not nearly impossible. 90% of all known codes (clean code) are made of 8 different instructions [ref: 2013 blackhat forum]. The rest 10% are the interesting bit. Plus a malware is more prone/lenient in running an eclectic piece of instruction.
As I said earlier and zanginator pointed out, sniffing out a computer is easy, making sense of that data is hard, which is still doable. It all depends on your needs
While I understand you might want to do this for fun...I just don't see the point, just start learning assembly or something and try your hand at writing an OS from scratch. Or better yet, learn C/C++ in conjunction with it and then after writing something in the high level language try to make it run faster in assembly. You'll get a huge grasp on how memory and CPUs work. What your asking seems like a waste of time. Just focus in on how to write the code and then as you move forward you'll realize you didn't waste your time.
but as a curiosity are you talking about running a piece of software in a virtual machine and seeing the input output of the operations the software is producing?
Absolutely. If you are interested in what the process is doing, you generally attach a debugger to the process. Most kernels have features that allow one process to get its meathooks into another process and "drive" it. For more info, read up on gdb - an excellent cli debugger which is very powerful if you know how to use it. During your studies, make sure you read about "compiling in/stripping out debugging symbols".
If you are interested in what calls the process is making, that is also commonly available information. In linux, the strace utility will tell you what system calls a process is making.
Both inline and system level debugging are very useful skills to master - not to mention absolutely required knowledge of a systems software engineer.
Make sure you understand how a process context switch works. Yes, you may read the registers, but the register state is private to your process.